johnvanbreda
commented
2 months ago I would suggest adding a separate attribute to capture the vitality, as it could be a dead adult or a dead egg (for example) which would be useful information for verification.
We've had an enquiry about records of an invasive marine mollusc species, the American Slipper Limpet, Crepidula fornicata. This is often recorded as a dead shell, and the invasive species projects need to be able to distinguish between sightings of live limpets as opposed to dead shells.
The records in question originate from iNaturalist. iNaturalist has an option for adding an 'annotation' to state whether the sighting is of a live or dead individual, but I don't think we currently import that annotation (and it is rarely filled in in iNat in any case).
The termlist for stages that we use in the warehouse for iNat records does not include a term "dead" or similar: https://warehouse1.indicia.org.uk/index.php/termlist/edit/811
We could consider importing the iNat "Alive or Dead" annotation, but I'm not sure that would help much as it can't be easily mapped to a standard output attribute when downloading records, and in any case most iNat records do not have this annotation.
The only short-term solution that I can see is to add the term "dead" to the iNat stages termlist, so that verifiers can choose to edit the records and apply the stage where required.
Question: can I just add another term to the iNat stage termlist (ID 811)? Would any complications arise from the fact that the term "dead" is not used as a stage term by iNat itself?